Pennsylvania (PA) Treasury recently implemented Oracle Governance, Risk, and Compliance (Oracle GRC) in an attempt to improve audit controls over its payment process by using advanced audit algorithms prior to processing billions of dollars in payments. This new platform is designed to enable the PA Treasury to expand upon its existing fiscal review processes, which seek to identify and prevent error, waste, and fraud. The solutions will help the PA Treasury audit every transaction, which is expected to increase the annual savings the Treasury realizes for taxpayers. Given the impact, scale, and proactive approach, PA Treasury has been selected to receive the new Oracle GRC Innovation award, which will be presented at Oracle OpenWorld 2014 in San Francisco.

In an ever-changing business environment, manufacturing companies must
be able to manage vast amounts of data quickly and efficiently. To
accommodate a growing customer base and massive global order volumes,
POSCO chose Oracle Product Hub, Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle
Engineered Systems to support the company's transformation, boost
performance, and increase operational efficiency. As a result POSCO has
been able to better serve its customers through advanced order processing
while laying the IT infrastructure for significant sustainable growth.

Keith Laker writes, "Since the term big data first appeared in our
lexicon of IT and business technology it has been intrinsically linked
to the no-SQL, or anything-but-SQL, movement. However, we are now seeing
that SQL is experiencing a renaissance. The term 'noSQL' has softened to
a much more realistic approach "not-only-SQL" approach. And now there
is an explosion of SQL-based implementations designed to support big
data. Leveraging the Hadoop ecosystem, there is: Hive, Stinger, Impala,
Shark, Presto and many more. Other NoSQL vendors such as Cassandra are
also adopting flavors of SQL. Why is there a growing level of interest
in the reemergence of SQL? ..."

With the growing size of information stored in today's databases,
accessing and using the right information has become increasingly
critical. Compression of the stored data to contain the storage
footprint is a key business proposition in every IT system design. At
the same time, being able to access, decompress and run queries faster
on the stored data is the burning need of any enterprise performing
analytics to shape their future business. Oracle software engineers have
incorporated various features into the Oracle Database to effectively
leverage the hardware resources such as cores, IO channels, and memory
of the underlying server. Oracle Database follows a 'shared everything
architecture' which allows flexibility in parallel execution and high
concurrency without overloading the system.

Oracle's focused investment in various technologies has allowed
unparalleled innovation across the stack from Application to Hardware...

Jeff Savit writes, "A new maintenance release to Oracle VM Server for SPARC has been released, providing several enhancements described in the What's New page. This update adds support for private VLANs and relieves virtual I/O scalability constraints. This was already announced in the Virtualization Blog, but the I/O scalability improvement deserves further discussion.

Previous blog entries have described scalability improvements that improve virtual disk and network I/O performance. This new update adds scalability in a different context, by increasing the number of virtual I/O devices a domain can have..."

"Seagate hard drives fail with more regularity than those from Western Digital or Hitachi, according to the latest results of an ongoing study by cloud service provider Backblaze.

Backblaze released data from 38,000 drives that store more than 100 petabytes in its data center. The research continued to show consumer drives had the same or better reliability compared with more costly enterprise-class drives.

Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman said enterprise drives also cost 'over 2x more than a consumer drive' so that purchasing the costlier drives even if they did fail less often wouldn't make sense..."

"Today in the all-flash array market there are two architectures for data
centers to choose from; scale out and scale up. Both have their unique
strengths and weaknesses. Deciding on the right architecture for an
organization's data center first depends on identifying what its primary
needs are. The problem is that needs often change but, in large part,
storage architectures do not.

Most data centers purchase an all-flash array to solve a specific problem
like a poor performing database application or performance issues in a
virtual desktop or virtual server environment..."

"Storage is getting complicated. What used to be a simple question of
SAN versus NAS is now a fast-changing maelstrom of new ideas, new ways
to solve storage problems, and new vendors. As Western Digital CEO Steve
Milligan said at the company's recent product launch, "There's never been
a time where there has been so much change and disruption simultaneously."

The advent of SSD triggered a sea-change in storage. The major storage
vendors gave way to a bunch of new companies that make only flash chips
or drive-level products..."

"In an era when everyone has a phone that can record video or audio, police have struggled to catch up with this new reality. Phone camera video recordings of officers behaving badly quickly go viral. But now the technology that puts miniaturized video cameras into smartphones also powers body-wearable cameras. And police are finding that to be a good thing..."

"I recently spent an energizing day with a client at a Silicon Valley innovation center. We were there to collaborate on a digital vision for the firm. I think the location helped, because we put pen to paper and came up with some fairly out-there ideas that were plausible enough to put the firm on its path to the future.

"Robots with legs should be able to go where wheeled robots cannot -
over obstacles and crevices.

The problem has been that legged robot have been ungainly and have needed
a lot of energy to get around.

A team of researchers at MIT may have figured out a way to make a
four-legged, cheetah-like robot run and jump more gracefully and
efficiently. To get there, they studied animals like dogs and cats
and used that biological information to create a new algorithm for
bounding..."

"The USB Implementers Forum has announced the USB Power Delivery 2.0 specification that will deliver power for multiple devices, including monitors, over one cable. The USB Type-C connector can handle up to 100 watts, which is more than enough for a display, including DisplayPort.

What this means is USB Type-C can carry DisplayPort 1.3 HBR3 signals over the wire, which means it can drive a 4k display at 60Hz, and still have enough room for two lanes of USB Superspeed+ (USB 3.1) available for any devices plugged into the display..."

"Though it is increasingly acknowledged by major business, investors
and governments that bitcoin has the power to enable potentially
world-changing financial innovations, fundamental issues are still
holding back adoption.

One of the most prominent, around the world, is the lack of consumer
understanding of the subject. For all its development, it remains
difficult to explain to the average person just how bitcoin technology
can impact their lives - today.

This begs the question: in its current form, is bitcoin, both the
technology and the wider industry, evolved enough yet to solve real
problems for the mass market?..."

Today I will extend to you three key reasons why the Bitcoin value
versus the 'Almighty Dollar' is of little significance, and may be
totally irrelevant both now, and in the future.

One reason can be from distilled from lessons learned in our history
of decentralized networks versus other centralized networks. One can
be realized through the present day landscape, and one looks into the
future of money as we know it. So let's begin with our ability to learn
from history.

"PayPal announced a monumental partnership today that will likely play a
large part in the adoption of bitcoin throughout the world. The company
has partnered with BitPay, Coinbase, and GoCoin to provide bitcoin
support to the millions of PayPal users.

The first project consists of integrating with the company's Payments
Hub, which is likely to be a small piece of the puzzle in the future
relationship between PayPal and the leading Bitcoin payment solutions
providers. Initially, digital goods merchants in North America will
be able to accept bitcoin through the Payments Hub, and depending on
popularity, may allow merchants around the globe to do the same..."

"Businesses love accepting Bitcoin. You have heard it on the news, read it on Reddit, and kept up with the latest market developments here at CryptoCoinsNews.com. The mainstream is starting to come around to Bitcoin, and the more they hear about Bitcoin, they more they accept Bitcoin as a smarter way to pay. Particularly for merchants, the benefits can be huge. Large, and small, businesses love accepting Bitcoin!..."

"Seemingly out of nowhere, a technology appears that changes the way
people think about an established industry. Vested interests see it as
a threat and become determined to ensure it does not undercut existing
profit structures.

Sounds like the synopsis of the story about bitcoin up to this
point? Well, yes, but digital currency isn't the first technology to
meet the resistance of incumbent parties..."

Oracle announced a new development milestone release for MySQL
5.7. Continuing to meet the demands of today's web, cloud, and
embedded applications, the new release further extends the performance,
scalability, and reliability of MySQL, the world's most popular open
source database, while enhancing management capabilities. Oracle also
announced several additional MySQL product releases and early access
features as well as the availability of MySQL source code on GitHub.com...

The MySQL Windows Experience Team is proud to announce the release of MySQL for Excel version 1.3.2. This is a GA release for 1.3.x. It can be used for production environments.

MySQL for Excel is an application plug-in enabling data analysts to very easily access and manipulate MySQL data within Microsoft Excel. It enables you to directly work with a MySQL database from within Microsoft Excel so you can easily do tasks such as:

Importing MySQL data into Excel

Exporting Excel data directly into MySQL to a new or existing table

Editing MySQL data directly within Excel

MySQL for Excel is installed using the MySQL Installer for Windows which comes in 2 versions...

Ronen Kofman writes that Oracle has announced "the general availability of Oracle OpenStack for Oracle Linux 1.0. With this announcement we are now providing production OpenStack support to Oracle Linux and Oracle VM customers. The support for OpenStack is available as part of the Oracle Linux and Oracle VM Premier Support at no additional cost..."

Michele Casey writes, "We're happy to announce the availability of Oracle Linux 5.11, the eleventh and final update release for Oracle Linux 5. ISO images will soon be available from the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud and the individual RPM packages have already been published to our public yum repository. This release includes the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 (2.6.39-400), Oracle's recommended kernel for Oracle Linux. For further details, please see the Oracle Linux 5.11 Release Notes.

Oracle Linux can be downloaded, used and distributed free of charge and updates and errata are freely available..."

Application migration can be daunting when IT pros first look to make their way to the public cloud, but it doesn't have to be, according to experts with experience moving workloads on behalf of clients. Whether you're a novice cloud user or one of the enterprise clouderati, some rules of thumb apply when moving apps from being hosted on-premises to a cloud service provider's data center.

It's important to note that at least half the battle lies in preparation for running in the cloud, from assessing applications to evaluating internal operations processes. After that, a phased, stepwise approach to cloud migration is strongly recommended.

Service level agreements (SLAs) have long been used by organizations to create mutually beneficial working relationships between a customer and its backup and disaster recovery provider.

SLAs are the most important part of a contract because they outline the exact uptime or recovery times the service provider is prepared to commit to. There is no room for sales or marketing-speak because if SLAs are not met, the customer is able to seek compensation.

The recent market gyrations may have you wondering if you should switch to another provider. With that in mind, we conducted an informal poll and asked cloud storage users for their opinions on the benefits and drawbacks of their services of choice.

The majority of respondents told us about their likes and dislikes of Dropbox (which earned six favorable mentions); Box (the favorite of five respondents); Google Drive (favored by four); and OneDrive (the recipient of four votes). Some participants use more than one service. A few other respondents chose lesser-known services, which you can read about in the "Cloud Storage Alternatives" section of this story.

We also put together an at-a-glance chart (below) that provides a quick comparison of the major cloud service providers..."

"Cloud computing applications are a specific set of technologies that can be used for business or pleasure. Despite the subset nature of cloud computing applications, there is a lot that architects, developers and business people need to know about the topic.

After spending all day communicating in business and tech jargon, sometimes it can be helpful to think about cloud application terms in the context of everyday objects and situations. Here are five important cloud application definitions and accompanying analogies to make the terms easier to remember..."

"In this interview, Ravi Ithal, Chief Architect at Netskope, discusses the top threats to cloud security and how they are changing the way we're using the cloud. He also talks about how the power of the cloud influences the agility of a modern security architecture and offers insight about who is ultimately responsible for data security in the cloud..."

"Building a private platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud that provides on-demand access to databases, middleware, presentation layer and other services can enable consumer agility, lower the cost to maintain that agility, and increase the utilization of on-premise resources.

That is a trifecta of self-reinforcing value for the business. Agility and cost have traditionally been thought of as tradeoffs in IT, but thanks to standardization, consolidation and automation that is tightly coupled with the technology used to provide cloud services, private PaaS clouds have the potential to eliminate that trade off..."

In what could be called a tale of perception versus reality, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) released the results of a new survey that found a significant difference between the number of cloud-based applications IT and security professionals believe to be running in their environments, and the number reported by cloud application vendors.

While many organizations say they have a hybrid cloud, in fact, they just have separate public and private clouds. This setup doesn't take advantage of the true values of cloud computing: orchestration, self-service automation, and the ability to scale up and down on demand by shifting workloads between public and private.

In the chaos of the new computing era, which is partly due to hype and confusion, the true hybrid cloud definition has lost its meaning. Both public and private clouds are built on a clustered COTS-based architecture that follows a standard method of automated orchestration and the ability to scale workloads by adding or subtracting VM instances as needed.

"We all know that using data to make decisions is better than relying on assumptions and opinions. But we also know that exercise is better for us than kicking back with a stiff drink and watching television. Is that knowledge enough to make us choose exercise? Not usually - unless we make a conscious effort to work it into our daily lives. People who exercise regularly tend to adopt habits such as putting their running shoes next to their bed or always working out at the same time, and data-driven people do the same thing. Here are five habits common among data-driven people..."

"Good news for today's MBA grads: The share of large company chief
executives with graduate business degrees has grown nearly 50 percent
in the past 10 years. But don't start decorating your corner office
yet. There's a lot to learn before you're ready to take the CEO chair.

Digitization and globalization will change industries in ways we can
just begin to imagine today. Everything will move faster - people, teams,
trends, portfolios, and competitors. Companies will find it harder to
meaningfully differentiate themselves, and they will need to make complex
trade-offs when deciding where to invest for growth..."

"After more than 20 years managing IT projects at global enterprises, I
have seen and experienced many situations. I've celebrated many successes
and also faced many challenges. Some of these experiences have served
as good examples of what works and what doesn't in IT project management.

Now I am putting these lessons to work in my current role as chief
technology risk officer at GE Capital. My job includes oversight of our IT
investments, making sure our largest-scale IT projects stay on track and
remain strategic to our business. Based on this broad set of experience,
here are five key lessons that have proven particularly useful:..:"

"Big data analytics projects are at the top of the IT priority list for many organizations looking to wring business benefits out of all the data -- structured, unstructured and semi-structured -- flowing into their systems. But with any initiative that offers big rewards, there are also accompanying big risks. That's certainly true of a big data implementation, which makes planning and managing deployments effectively a must..."

"In Monitor DNS Traffic & You Just Might Catch A RAT, I described how inspecting DNS traffic between client devices and your local recursive resolver could reveal the presence of botnets in your networks. Today, I'll share how you can monitor traffic using security systems and name resolvers you may already have deployed..."

"Network and system monitoring is a broad category. There are solutions that monitor for the proper operation of servers, network gear, and applications, and there are solutions that track the performance of those systems and devices, providing trending and analysis. Some tools will sound alarms and notifications when problems are detected, while others will even trigger actions to run when alarms sound. Here is a collection of open source solutions that aim to provide some or all of these capabilities..."

"When we think about big data, we associate it with the term big, but when it comes to building infrastructure, we should also be thinking distributed.

Big data applications do, in fact, deal with large volumes of information that are made even bigger as data is replicated across racks for resiliency. Yet the most meaningful attribute of big data is not its size, but its ability to break larger jobs into lots of smaller ones, distributing resources to work in parallel on a single task.

When you combine the big with a distributed architecture, you find you need a special set of requirements for big data networks. Here are six to consider:.."

"Black Friday is mere weeks away and major retailers have already begun stress-testing their ecommerce sites to make sure they can handle the load. Failure to accommodate the onslaught of post-Thanksgiving shoppers might result not only in embarrassing headlines, but also millions of dollars in lost revenue.

BlazeMeter is a self-service, performance-testing platform provider that works with a variety of major retailers, including Walmart, Gap, and Disney. Its advice to retailers: September stress tests are essential to a glitch-free Black Friday..."

"SDN has become central to the bigger vision of the "software-defined data center" (SDDC), which is built on three key pillars -- programmable, software-defined servers, networks and storage.

Server virtualization has created software-defined environments for virtual machines (VMs), and the edge or last hop of the network now lives inside the server stack, providing connections between VMs and outside servers. Meanwhile, new programmable storage solutions can run over converged data center networks and must be correctly configured, provisioned and managed. Overall, the network infrastructure has become more programmable and it is quickly evolving..."

Just because you have an incident response plan and an incident response team doesn't mean your organization is ready for a data breach.

Nearly three-fourths of US Fortune 500 companies now have set up incident response plans and teams in preparation for cyberattacks, but only one-third of them consider their IR operations actually effective in the face of a data breach, according to a new study.

"It's one thing to hire a third-party developer to build a mobile app. It's quite another to trust a pen tester, MSSP, or DDoS protection firm. But the fact is, the threat landscape is complex, and few organizations can keep security completely in house. Here's how to decide what to outsource and select and manage providers..."

"5G networks will be fundamental in driving the rise of Internet of Things (IoT) projects across the UK, but privacy fears must be addressed head-on to ensure development is not stifled, according to MP and former UK government science minister David Willetts.

Willetts, speaking at the 5G Huddle event in London, said he was excited about the potential for 5G to be the true driver of IoT services, ranging from smart cities to internet-connected home appliances and smart meters..."

Earlier this year, I was brainstorming with Greg Martin, the founder and chief technical officer of ThreatStream, a Google Ventures-backed security startup, about finding a way to show the global nature of attacks against industrial-control systems used in electrical grids, water systems and manufacturing plants. For obvious reasons, attacks against critical infrastructure are among the biggest concerns in cyber-security.

"Back in the late '80s, I helped maintain the infamous Dirty Dozen malware list, which was created by Tom Neff and later updated by Eric Newhouse. The Dirty Dozen list originated because (cue the nostalgia) we had only a handful or two of malware programs to worry about. Neff's original list contained mostly Trojans, although early Apple viruses made it as well.

The number of malware programs quickly became multiple dozens, then exceeded 100. Neff and Newhouse gave up on maintaining the list because their hobby was taking up too much of their free time..."

"Once mobile devices are connected to car infotainment systems and cars are connected to the Internet, vehicles will become a rich source of data for manufacturers, marketers, insurance providers and the government. Oh, and they'll be a lucrative target for hackers, too.

Unlike mobile device makers that use state-of-the-art technology to secure their devices, the automotive industry has generally been a technology laggard when it comes to privacy. The computer systems in automobiles, like so many other systems, may be built from years-old technology because of the three-to-five-year vehicle development cycle..."

"Is the dawn of the age of ubiquitous e-payments finally here? Can we
throw away our credit cards yet?

I wish! If you read my column regularly, you know that payment systems
are a particular interest of mine. I've been holding out hope for a few
years now that big improvements were just around the corner..."

"Career stuck in the mud? It might be time to take a peek in the mirror to figure out what's going wrong.

When IT pros think 'mistake,' they usually think in technical terms: The bugs in your code, the 'whoops' moments in a production environment, the obvious-in-hindsight security hole -- these things can and do happen. But technology mistakes, unless they're of the catastrophic, time-to-find-a-new-gig variety, are usually pretty straightforward. Recognize the error, fix it, learn from it, and move on..."

"Dealing with angry customers is a (sometimes daily) reality for those
working in the retail and customer service industries. Whether it's in
person or over the phone, a customer reacting harshly can easily put
a damper on anyone's day. Worse still is if a situation should arise
where this ultimately affects business and money is lost on account of
the customer's poor temperament. While most of us might like to retort
in kind, it is important to remember a few things:..."

"We techies have a hard time building and maintaining credibility with our
stakeholders. High expectations are hard to manage. Bugs happen. And we
get blamed unfairly for all sorts of things that are out of our control.

But we also have a habit of making things worse, undermining our
credibility inadvertently and unnecessarily. Probably the most common
of these unforced errors comes in the form of two simple words..."

Designing and installing a new virtual server farm requires detailed knowledge on the hardware and software components you need. Often times, this process can seem overwhelming and there are few documents that tell you what you need to create your next server farm or even how to virtualize your business or application. Part of the problem is that each environment and business is unique, and there is no single one-size-fits-all best practice approach. However, with some simple math and a bit of research, you can correctly size and design your next virtual farm.

"Determining the number of hosts and VMs you will need to support your applications is just the first step in designing your virtual server farm -- you'll also need to figure out how much memory and CPU resources each host should contain. In a previous article I explained how to use simple math to calculate the quantity of hosts you'll need. Using those calculations, you can now determine the resources needed in each host.

Since we are adding to our existing infrastructure in this example, we will assume existing storage and networking infrastructure is already up to the task, leaving us to focus on host CPU and memory configurations..."

"Data protection-specific compliance regulations and state secrecy have become a big concern for multinational corporations and law firms conducting business in Asia, according to a new study. The report, conducted in part by FTI Consulting Inc., found that the combination of numerous regulatory compliance mandates, data privacy/confidentiality rules and broad Chinese state secrecy laws present challenges for businesses as they conduct e-discovery processes in Asia.

In this Q&A, FTI Consulting Senior Managing Director Veeral Gosalia discusses the E-discovery in Asia: Legal, Technical and Cultural Issues study and how it influences compliance and legal management at multinational organizations..."

"In a new book out this week chock full of Google-flavored business wisdom, How Google Works, Google executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt and former Senior Vice President of Products Jonathan Rosenberg share nine insightful rules for emailing (or gmailing!) like a professional...

Communication in the Internet Century usually means using email, and email, despite being remarkably useful and powerful, often inspires momentous dread in otherwise optimistic, happy humans. Here are our personal rules for mitigating that sense of foreboding:..."

"Ever hear the phrase 'clear your cache' and wondered about this voodoo
magic? In most situations, people are probably referring to your browser
cache so that you can see the latest data or content on a website or
application. There are, however, four major caching types typically used
in web development and hosting.

"The IEEE is embarking on an ambitious effort to build a overarching architecture for the Internet of Things, spanning a multitude of industries and technologies.

IEEE P2413, which the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers officially started work on in July, would form a framework for interoperability among connected devices and related applications in home automation, industrial systems, telematics and all other sectors that are expected to use IoT in the coming years. While leaving room for differences across those industries, the standard would allow for sharing of data across IoT systems, according to Oleg Logvinov, chair of the IEEE P2413 Working Group..."

Lingeswaran writes, "You can download the ZFS storage appliance from oracle. This is a pre-built virtual machine simulating the actual Sun ZFS Storage Appliance that comes with the Oracle Super Cluster. Here we will see how to install and configure ZFS storage appliance for demonstration purpose..."

"Web developers love JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). Like XML, it's a human-readable format for transmitting data, except it's a whole lot easier to work with than XML. It just stands to reason that Web developers would find JavaScript a much more pleasant way of accessing data than writing to a SQL database.

Several NoSQL databases -- including the wildly successful MongoDB and Couchbase -- store data in JSON documents natively. No surprise then, as MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz acknowledged in an interview I did a few weeks ago, that developers have been "the No. 1 group" driving NoSQL document database adoption..."

"Data backup and storage is the IT equivalent of tidying up at the end of the day. Putting all your information away neatly so you know it is accounted for, secure and easy to find again. An unlikely topic, you would imagine, for strong opinions and lively debate. Yet that is exactly what it has become and for good reason.

Every day more data is handled by more employees who are spread across multiple locations and use a variety of devices. This increases the vulnerability of information..."

"In spite of vendors' relentless push for customers to move resources to the public cloud, it is becoming more common for organizations to deploy private or hybrid clouds.

Of course, moving to a private cloud environment represents a fundamental shift in the way that IT services are provided throughout the organization and it is important to consider how this transition will impact the backup and recovery process..."

"Whether we talk about football, car racing or sailing, advances in the capture, storage and analysis of data are affecting just about every aspect of sports. Data allows athletes to train better and more effectively and it allows teams to alter their in-game decision-making based on what they're seeing. It is also changing the way broadcasters produce sports entertainment and the way teams and broadcasters engage with fans. Here are just a few of the ways big data is changing the business of sports..."

"Big data is an area emerging data technology receiving quite a lot of attention from software vendors, industry analysts and data professionals for how it will revolutionize company operations and customer insights. Big data is also changing how we will architect our data infrastructure for the future as well as how we think about data quality. Data professionals and chief data officers are involved and leading many of these initiatives inside their companies.

Often overlooked are other emerging technologies that that can impact -- both positively and negatively -- data quality and data management practices. Data professionals would be wise to understand these new technologies and proactively participate in their deployment.

"There's probably not a day -- if not an hour -- that goes by when you don't hear about big data: managing big data, analyzing big data. Indeed, the term has been so widely and, at times, so inappropriately applied that it has started to lose its meaning.

And there's something to watch out for in all the talk about big data and its potential benefits. It's the big data lie -- the notion that big data can automatically solve any number of business problems and position businesses to compete more effectively with their rivals..."

"To support economic, social and collaboration goals, governments around the globe are pursuing open data initiatives: San Francisco has doubled down on open data with a simplified portal geared toward fulfilling strategic plans, while the California controller has unveiled its first open data portal, and Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New York, Oklahoma and Utah are said to lead the nation in open data initiatives..."

"The last time I wrote about big data, in July, I called it a big, distracting bubble. But it's worse than that. Big data is an ideology. A religion. One of its most important gospels is, of course, at Wired.

In 2008, Chris Anderson talked up a thing called The Petabyte Age in The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete..."

"With so much hype about big data, it's hard for IT leaders to know how to exploit its potential. Gartner dispels five myths to help IT leaders evolve their information infrastructure strategies.

"Big data offers big opportunities, but poses even bigger challenges. Its sheer volume doesn't solve the problems inherent in all data," said Alexander Linden, research director at Gartner. "IT leaders need to cut through the hype and confusion, and base their actions on known facts and business-driven outcomes."

"Between Google Glass and the Apple iWatch, interest in wearables
has never been higher. Deloitte Consulting predicts that 10 million
devices will be sold this year alone, representing a $3 billion market
largely that's currently driven by consumers. However, Bill Briggs,
CTO at Deloitte Consulting, says that over the long term, the market for
wearables in the enterprise could surpass the consumer market. Here are
some examples of wearables coming to a variety of vertical industries..."

"When it comes down to adopting bring-your-own-device (BYOD) schemes, employee adoption is hampered by a lack of trust in employers and a lack of faith that individual privacy will be protected.

New research conducted by Ovum on behalf of mobile security firm AdaptiveMobile says these two factors remain a barrier to increased mobility within the enterprise. When asked to use personal devices for work purposes, end users trust mobile service providers more than employers to protect their privacy, according to the survey. While over 84 percent of employees rated privacy as a top three concern, there is a 'clear lack of trust' and belief that corporations are able to manage their mobile security and privacy effectively..."

"A new study suggests Bring Your Own Device workers may be getting burnt out. Their self-imposed blended work-life lifestyle essentially puts them on call around the clock, over weekends and on vacations, which can lead to copious amounts of stress, according to a TEKsystems survey of more than 300 IT professionals.

Half of respondents say the constant mobile connection to work apps, documents and email has increased their stress because they're never able to unplug. More than 60 percent would prefer to go back to the old days working set hours and being inaccessible during personal time..."

The recent Apple and Android announcements, not to mention the recent California court case results about employer reimbursements for Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), speak to some powerful trends pushing and pulling BYOD. Recently, I had a chance to speak with Matthew David, chief digital strategist for Lochbridge (formerly CW Professional Services) to get a his view on the current state of BYOD out in the market.

tw telecom announced that it is expanding its nationwide network solutions into Cleveland. The company is now able to deploy its industry-leading portfolio of data and Internet services to more enterprises in Ohio. tw telecom also operates in Cincinnati, Columbus and Dayton.

Cleveland businesses will now have access to tw telecom's Business Ethernet, innovative Intelligent Network and IP networking solutions as well as its ecosystem of on-net datacenters. As part of its entrance into Cleveland, tw telecom recently signed an agreement with BlueBridge Networks, a leading data center and managed services provider, to provide customers of its downtown Cleveland data center location with its networking solutions.

tw telecom announced it is expanding its network and extensive product suite in the New York Hudson Valley and western Connecticut. The company is introducing service to enterprises and data center customers in Westchester and Fairfield counties, The Bronx, as well as Greenwich and Stamford, Conn.

tw telecom is expanding its existing network in San Diego with service into the fast growing business parks of Carlsbad. This effort helps meet increasing demand for tw telecom's industry-leading portfolio of data and Internet services, including its innovative Business Ethernet and Intelligent Network capabilities.

The San Diego expansion closely follows other expansion campaigns up the coast of California announced earlier this year. Last spring, the company expanded its network across nine new cities in Orange County, Calif. including Brea, Cypress, East Anaheim and Huntington Beach.